snatched the cap from his head, and others in quick succession
cut away a shoulder strap, scored a red weal across his neck, stabbed
through the point of his shoulder. And when a shell-fragment smashed
the gun under his hands, he left it only to plunge hastily to the other
gun abandoned by all but dead and dying; pulled off a dead man who
sprawled across it and recommenced shooting. He stopped firing only
when his last cartridge was gone; squatted a moment longer staring over
the sights, and then raised his head and peered out into the trailing
film of smoke clouds from the bursting shells. Although it took him a
minute to be sure of it he saw plainly at last that the attack was
broken. Dimly he could see the heaped clusters of dead that lay out in
the open, the crawling and limping figures of the wounded who sought
safety back in the cover of their own trench, and more than that he
could see men running with their heads stooped and their gray coats
flapping about their ankles. It was this last that roused him again to
action. He scrambled hurriedly back down the broken parapet into the
trench. "Come on, you fellows," he shouted to two or three nearby men
who continued to fire their rifles over the parapet. "It's no use
waitin' here any longer." A heavy shell whooped roaring over them and
crashed thunderously close behind the parapet. Bunthrop paid no
slightest heed to it. His wide, staring eyes and white face, and blood
smeared from the trickling wound in his neck, his capless head and
tumbled hair, his clay and mud-caked and blood-stained uniform all gave
him a look of wildness, of desperation, of abandonment. His sergeant,
the man who had seen his fear and set him to pile the sandbags, caught
sight of him again now, heard some word of his shoutings, and pushed
hastily along the trench to where he fidgeted and called angrily to the
others to "chuck that silly shooting--I'm goin' anyhow ... what's the
use...."

The sergeant interrupted sharply.

"Here, you shut up, Bunthrop," he shouted. "Keep down in the trench.
You're wounded, aren't you? Well, you'll get back presently."

"That be damn," said Bunthrop. "You don't understand. They're runnin'
away, but we can't go out after 'em if these silly blighters here keep
shootin'. Come on now, or they'll all be gone." And Private Bunthrop,
the despised "conscript," slung his bayoneted rifle over his wounded
shoulder and commenced to scramble up out over the front of the brok